Phil Rickman - The Chalice

But – hey! – it was suddenly immaculately weird.

The mist had come up behind them, surrounding them like this chilly, fuzzy hedge, forming yet another circle. So they were kind of locked into the pattern of the old maze which had been around the Tor in prehistoric times.

And there was one more inner space: the tower was roofless, like a chimney; you could stand inside – the flags underfoot dead slippery on account of all the zillions of pilgrims over the centuries – and you could gaze up the stone shaft into the night. And the night could come down it.

Gwyn was in there now, in the centre of everything, catching the night.

He hadn't seen Gwyn arrive. The man was just suddenly among them, in a long coat, no telling what he was wearing underneath.

Gwyn the Shaman, who walked with the spirits. Headlice didn't know who Gwyn was or where he came from. There were stories about how Gwyn had been in Tibet with the Masters, or been initiated into the Wiccan coven at the age of ten then studied for the priesthood just to get both sides. All this might be total bullshit, but if you knew for a fact that Gwyn was, say, an ex-garage mechanic from Wolverhampton or just some toerag who'd found a copy of King of the Witches in the prison library, it'd like seriously detract, wouldn't it?

Gwyn had lit a candle, in a glass lantern because of the breeze, and he stood behind it in the arched doorway which led into the tower's bare interior and then out through an identical arch on the other side. His beard was gilded by the candlelight. Bran had set up this slow heartbeat on his hand-drum. Then more lanterns were lit until there was a semicircle of them around the archway, sending Gwyn's priestly shadow racing up the stone.

Shaman. Mort swore he'd once seen Gwyn conjure a fire out of dry grass from six feet away. 'Magic, eh?' Headlice said to Steve, and Steve glanced at him and smiled and said nothing.

The throb of Bran's drum made the air vibrate, like the night sky itself was one big stretched skin.

Then Headlice felt a tug, and they were moving. Round and round the tower. The only sounds the drumming and the slithering of their feet on the grass, and he felt like a cog in an ancient, sacred mechanism and was totally blissed out.

At first.

'The problem is,' Juanita said, 'I don't know where I stand any more. Whose side I'm on.'

Watching the Tor by night.

From less than half a mile away, it looked mysteriously pretty, with the lights, above a band of mist, making a faint frill around the base of the St Michael tower. They'd stopped on the edge of a small wood, unsure about this now that they were so close.

Jim's lamp had found a tree stump, and Juanita sat on it and talked.

'When Danny and I arrived it was very exciting, in an innocent way. We used to come here and watch for flying saucers. There'd been that big flap over at Warminster. Close Encounters. And books by John Michell and then J. M. Powys, and this all-pervading sense of… optimism, I suppose. Simple and naive as that.'

'I do believe there was a special optimism then,' Jim said.

Although, naturally, we were very po-faced about it at the building society. Love-ins and be-ins and squats – not many mortgages in all that nonsense. I suppose I was just annoyed because I was rather too old for it all.'

' Then the spontaneity seemed to dissipate.' Juanita lit a cigarette. 'It became institutionalised and politicised. And you ended up with what we have now – New Age cliques and elitism. Like The Cauldron.'

'Oh. That.'

'There you are, you're alienated.'

'I'm not alienated. I like women. The Cauldron's all right as far as I'm concerned.'

'But you're not as far as they're concerned, that's the problem, Jim.'

'Everybody's got the answer,' Jim said. They're all so certain about it. Nobody seems content with mystery any more. Except me. I love mystery for its own sake. I think a true appreciation of the quality of mystery is the most the majority of us can ever hope for.'

The glow on the Tor began to flicker in and out, as though people were moving through it.

'We never saw any saucers,' Juanita said sadly. 'I didn't, anyway. But we knew that when the star people landed they'd land here. Because this was the centre. And we knew they'd be good aliens who'd respond to our spiritual aspirations. I used to imagine them coming into the shop – you know, at night. I'd hear a noise and creep down, and there'd be a couple of benign beings in shiny suits leafing through the books. To work out how far we'd got up the spiritual ladder.'

Jim was silent for a while, looking up at the gauzy lights on the Tor. Then he said, 'That's why you've stayed, isn't it? In Glastonbury.'

'Sorry?'

'Unfinished business. The hippy dream. Peace and love. You still hope that out of all this chaos there might be the seed of harmony and this is the place to nurture it. You're still hoping the good aliens will land.'

'Don't be ridiculous.' Juanita felt herself blush. 'That would make me a very sad person, wouldn't it?'

She felt his smile. And his own hopeless longing. waken stone and darkness gather waken stone and darkness gather nahmu nahmu nahmu nah in the bowl of darkness gather nahmu nahmu nahmu nah.

The half-whispered chant was still hissing in Headlice's ears when the circle stopped turning.

When he was sure he was still, he looked up to find the whole of the sky was still revolving, going round and round and round the tower, moon and stars and wisps of cloud.

Moon and stars and wispy cloud, moon and stars and moon and stars and… and everything turning into a chant. Everything with its own rhythm. Magic.

Was it, though? Was it? He glanced at Mort, whose head was bowed into his chest, dead relaxed as usual. Headlice felt a pulse of anger.

Come on. Get real, you 're just dizzy, man. Magic? Magic's the chemicals working on the brain. Magic's what you conjure up in yourself to get your head uncluttered of all that shit about finding a job and taking your place in, like, 'society'. This pilgrimage, this is a celebration of freedom. This is our country, man, ours, not yours to put fuckin' fences around. This is where we can come and breathe the free air and light fires and tell tales about the old gods and get well pissed and stoned and shag our brains out, and when we wake up in the jingle-jangle Arabian morning we'll sit around and talk about what it was like up the Tor, all the presences we felt around us, how, like, holy it was. But it'll all be in our heads, stoned memories. On account of nothing happened, not really.

Yet this was the real place. The place. Go with it. It may never happen again like this. Like when they took you into all those St Michael churches, made you go in backwards; you didn't question that. How are you ever gonna change if you don't, like, submit, roll with it?

He let himself go limp. Rolled with it.

Gwyn was on the stones outside the tower, the light from the candles on his feet and all the objects around him, which included a metal cup – like a chalice – and a whip with a leather handle and kind of thongs, like a cat o'nine tails And a curved, ritual knife, like a little scythe with the moonlight in its blade.

A woman was handing a bowl to Gwyn. It was Rozzie, in a long, dark, loose robe twitching in the night breeze. (So when, exactly, had his woman been picked as Gwyn's handmaiden?),

Then the people either side of him, Mort and the woman called Steve, tightening their grip on Headlice's sweating hands as the cup was filled from the bowl – holy water from the Chalice Well, someone whispered – and the hands parted to receive the cup as it was passed around the circle. Holy water from the Chalice Well, cold water, metal-tasting, passed round anti-clockwise and again and again, and each time it got to him – drink deep, drink deep – the cup always full, so maybe there were two of them or maybe the sacred water was replenishing itself by… magic.